Aside from a few neurological-aspect details (that I'm still mulling over), I've had little to add over the past year to my earlier posts, but what has changed in that time is our 'leader-decider-provider's methods of dealing with what seems to be the larger population's state of dependency upon them.
The internet today is an accumulation of around twenty years of data. In the earliest days, everyone had their own homepage, blog, or some other form of content, but it didn't seem to be human habit to date any of this data (unless the csm, like this one, did it for us), and even media and software developers seemed to share the same oversight. Google does have a 'tool' that allows us to search for results within a certain time span, but it is not settable by default (please correct me on this if I am wrong). Add to this the increasing corporate and for-pay-friendly search results returned to us by Google, and the result is: a) a layer of for-pay content/wares that only may concern our searches, and b) a second layer of results deemed 'most relevant' that have origins anywhere in time. Add again to this Google's recent seeming change to their algorithm that 'culls' results they deem 'not relevent': in short, any search query today about anything not in the 'most popular' or 'most sold' (or 'most paid for') category will result in an incomprehensible mess.
And all this in spite of today's (would-be) AI technology: the only thing to reasonably conclude from this continued trend is that Google must like it that way.
What inspired this rant: a week-end of mostly-lost time researching a means to encapsulate Drupal variables. Some of the methods I found turned out to be, only after dozens of pages of reading (across several websites, because the Drupal documentation itself, in addition to being largely un-dated (in any obvious way), is mostly user-contributed, thus hopelessly incomplete), completely non-sequitur to any recent version of Drupal. Searching for other non-Drupal methods of capturing PHP variables buried under a layer of Twig resulted in more of the same. In the end, what I was looking for turned out to be hiding in plain sight: an extension dating back to Drupal 6 (we are on version 9 today) that has been maintained (in spite of what Google results told me by not turning up recent (un-dated) additions to the module's page), and a plug-in to the IDE (that is seemingly not, at first sight, an IDE) that I'm already using (for free!).
And yet again add to this efforts by the least-well-intentioned parts of humanity to 'drown' any reasoned or fact-based searches in pointless, credulance-seeking 'noise': with Google judging the value of any content 'for' us, and there being no other well-performing alternative to it on the market, anyone looking for anything corresponding to reality (and not 'feelings' or 'concepts' or 'popularity'), without a LOT of effort (and just as many bullshit-detecting abilities), are almost just as much in the dark today as they were thirty years ago.
